Your Life On a Hard Drive 186
Iddo Genuth writes to point us to his The Future of Things blog, where he has put up a rumination on the idea of recording one's whole life, beginning with Vannevar Bush's 1945 "Memex" (from the same essay in which he envisioned digital photography and advanced electronic computers). This serves as introduction to an interview with Microsoft Research's Gordon Bell, arguably the first man to attempt recording (most of) his life. From TFoT: "If humans may be viewed as the sum total of their memories, then at our doorstep may be a life changing revolution: the ability to store one's entire life experiences on an accessible and easily searchable file. In this article, we examine this idea, as well as some of the problems involved in its application."
It Happened Once & It's Over (Score:5, Interesting)
When I experience something, it's a multitude of things. It's not just my five senses which can be recreated to within some threshold
I would view it and try to remember what I was like back then but I'd still be me now. I've still kissed ten or twenty other girls in passion. You could never put me back there and it's laughable to aim for that goal.
I also believe that humans are dynamic beings and that we are more than "the sum total of our memories..." These may affect behavior but they do not necessarily define us.
More importantly, I'm more intelligent now. Show me the video clip of me pulling a garden hose off a shelf in kindergarten and I'll wince as the sledge on top of it plummets off of the shelf and destroys my big toe. I'll watch it over and over and over again and dwell on how stupid I was. Or, I'll move on with my life.
People who want to do this are possibly suffering from a legacy complex where they are worried about what mark they leave on the world. Maybe this will satisfy you and maybe you'll make your kids experience these but it's not going to change the facts--there's a low probability anyone but your offspring will remember you. Hell, I don't even know any generation prior to my grandparents and neither does history.
Things happen to us--for better or for worse they happen. Let's experience them and move on. I don't dwell on pictures, I don't dwell on home videos, if you want memories of joyous occasions then record them but nobody wants to watch me go to work day after day.
Experiences != memories (Score:3, Interesting)
"Humans" clearly aren't properly viewed as the sum total of their memories. First, there's an incongruity between the concept "human" and the concept "memory." Second, even if we ignore this incongruity, shouldn't it be "total of their experiences", not memories?
The Final Cut (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds me of a movie I just saw called "Final Cut [slashdot.org]">The Final Cut with Robin Williams. In the movie he plays a "cutter". His job is to splice the full memories of people (who have had a chip implanted into their brains) into little films to play at their funerals. It was a very interesting movie.
That said... what a waste of space. How much of my life will I spend watching TV. Good thing we might be able to record all that soon.
Re:It Happened Once & It's Over (Score:2, Interesting)
Not for you, but if I cloned you, and raised you using the recording of your life so that everything was exactly the same, all five senses, would you clone have pulled the garden hose off the shelf without thinking about the sledgehammer? Would his first kiss have been exactly the same?
it's also the state of my mind at the time.
The deeper question here is whether the state of your mind is the sum of all of the inputs up to that instant. If you started over with a clone and fed it the same inputs, would it reach the same state of mind?
Baby steps (Score:5, Interesting)
The utility of having this much space on your phone isn't just storing MP3s, videos, and whatnot. The real potential is in what this means you can create.
I'd like to have my phone be a constant or voice activated recorder. I have my phone on me at all times, it has a microphone, why not have it provide me a 'cockpit voice recorder' of sorts for life? No more guessing exactly what my wife told me to do, or having to write down phone numbers.
Generation 1, your phone just records MP3s of life as it happens to you. If anything interesting happens during the day, you save the file on your computer.
Generation 2, it meta overlays GPS data and is automatically stored as part of your 'diary'. You store it in an encrypted location so it can't be used against you unless you choose to release it, and you have a perfect alibi showing what you said and where you were.
Generation 3, combine voice processing to index everything spoken around you into a searchable form, recognize phone numbers, voices, etc, and create a full digital assistant. At some point around here, it can also store a digital video feed from any cameras you or your personal equipment might have that's synchronized with everything.
Generation 4, it hunts down Sarah Conner.
Everytime someone puts a bunch of storage into something, someone else says "what's the use?" And human nature being what it is, some other asshole decides to invent something cool to use that storage/capabillity for just so they can give the finger to the first person.
Yeah, right... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not a breakthrough. If it is used as a body of data, rather than as entertainment, then it is just a bigger archaeological record, but it is not transformative in any way.
If it is used as entertainment (as it no doubt will be), then this is just the new "reality entertainment" mechanism with six billion channels of reality TV on all the time. If you thought biography, autobiography, and reality TV were bad, just wait for Totality Multimedia. In the most banal sense, given how much entertainment we already consume, you will finally get to spend you life watching other people watch TV. And then, you'll get to read about what they thought as they did it, and listen to the sound of them not speaking over the sound of the radio. It's so postmodern it's primitive.
So you can observe an entire recorded world in all its banality... Or you can turn toward the window and observe an entire world being recorded in all its banality. Life reduces to itself. Yay.
It does create an interesting paradox, though: with this much data, to absorb the entirety of another's life as object, you must indeed sacrifice a good percentage of your own life as subject (assuming that it would take something on the order of your natural life to view the entire record [if possible at all] of another's). Actually, that's not even very interesting, as it merely telescopes down to "if someone else wastes their life, and you are passively there for the entirety, contributing nothing, doing nothing, then you also waste yours."
Sort of goes without saying. I suppose there's a kind of performance art in being born, living, and dying only to watch someone else being born, living, and dying. But that's about it.
I have something like this - it's called email (Score:5, Interesting)
A few months ago, I was going through some personal stuff about a relationship that had just ended. I wondered what the heck was I thinking when I decided to start dating this woman. So, I went back in my emails to the time when I started dating her and there were all my thoughts right there. I realized I was deluded when I started dating her, and knowing that made me feeel better for some reason. So, I guess going back in that fashion can have it's benefits, but I think recording absolutely everything is a bit much.
I'm sure a diary/journal would serve similar purposes, but for some reason, this works for me.
Re:and if (Score:3, Interesting)